This is the 2024-25 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Jake Sanderson
Ottawa Senators Defense
Twenty-three minutes a night at 21, and the best defenceman on the club by a distance.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-23 | OTT | 77 | 4 | 28 | 32 | -6 | 12 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 132 | 3.0 | 21:55 |
| 2023-24 | OTT | 79 | 10 | 28 | 38 | +8 | 23 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 158 | 6.3 | 23:13 |
| 2024-25 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 156 | 14 | 56 | 70 | +2 | 35 | 5 | 0 | 3 | 290 | 4.8 | 22:34 |
This Season So Far
The 2024-25 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
79 games, 10 goals and 28 assists for 38 points, 3 on the power play, 23 penalty minutes, 23:13 a night and plus-8. He took 53.0 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five over 1,318 minutes, the 75th percentile and the most five-on-five ice on the club, and his ice went 57-55 against an expectation of 55.45-49.14.
Two goals of finishing above what the chances were worth and six more conceded than they called for. Thirty-eight points and ten goals are both career highs, and 23:13 at 21 is the largest workload anybody on this roster carried.
The Finesse Game
233 attempts at a median of 50 feet with 67 per cent of them from beyond forty and 9 per cent from inside twenty, 158 of those on goal, converted at 6.3 per cent against a career 4.83 across 290 shots.
56 career assists in 156 games. He skates the puck out of trouble rather than passing it out, and the first pass when he does make it is already the best on the club. The point shot is a distribution tool and not a weapon.
The Physical Game
He is 6-2 and 202 and took 23 penalty minutes.
35 career penalty minutes in 156 games is a very low rate for a defenceman taking twenty-three minutes. He defends with his feet and his stick and closes gaps early enough that he rarely has to finish a check; at his size that will need to change against the heaviest forwards.
The Intangibles
Fifth overall in 2020, two seasons, 70 points in 156 games and a career plus-2 on a club that has been outscored in both of them.
He played 79 games at 21 in the hardest role on the roster and came out of it on the right side of the chances. There is nothing else on this blue line that resembles it.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
- durable· was available
79 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
- drives-play· the shot clock turns his way while he is out there
53.0% of the expected goals at five-on-five with him on, 47.4% for his club in the minutes he sat: +5.6, 96th percentile among defencemen
Season to season, this measure repeats moderately (0.39) · 29% keep it
“He skates the puck out of trouble rather than passing it out, and the first pass when he does make it is already the best on the club.”
“He defends with his feet and his stick and closes gaps early enough that he rarely has to finish a check; at his size that will need to change against the heaviest forwards.”
“56 career assists in 156 games.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2023-24 · 1,318 minutes
- Expected goals
- 53%
- 76th pct
- Shot attempts
- 53.6%
- 82nd pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 57 for, 55 against. Expected: 55.5 and 49.1.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 19 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.
Both bars are percentiles among the 652 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 71 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2023-24 · 79 games
- Top speed
- 23.1 mph
- 95th pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 2.29 a game
- Distance
- 3.21 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 97.1 mph
- 81st pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.7
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.2
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2023-24 · 1318 minutes at five-on-five
- Artem Zub64%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2023-24
- The club
- OTT took 49.2% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 53.0% — 3.8 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- Second pair, 1,318 minutes at five-on-five — 90th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artem Zub | 54.8% | 50.1% | 46.4% |
| Claude Giroux | 55.3% | 51.5% | 50.9% |
| Brady Tkachuk | 58.1% | 49.5% | 53.5% |
54.8% together, 50.1% for him apart and 46.4% for Zub apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
233 unblocked shots in 2023-24, 10 of them goals. His median goal came from 41 feet. 9% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 67% from beyond forty.